tutorial

[Burkhard Sell]

i can't help you at all, but:

the shapefile format is a new working and interchange format
promulagated by ESRI (http://www.esri.com/) for simple vector data with
attributes. it is apparently the only file format that can be edited in
ARCView, and can also be exported and imported in Arc/Info.
an excellent white paper on the shapefile format is available from ESRI,
(.pdf format)

cool sites to start if you are interested in GIS are 
  http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/giswww.html
  http://freegis.org/
  http://gis.co.hunterdon.nj.us/

burkhard sell

-----Original Message-----
From: rfriedman at saucontech.com [mailto:rfriedman at saucontech.com]
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 3:22 PM
To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: tutorial




I am new to the field of map rendering and would like to know how I can
learn
more about the 'big picture.' For instance, what is a shapefile and how
do I
create one? What are mapfiles, views, templates, etc.?  I know there is
a
tutorial off the mapserver homepage, but it is very bare-bones and seems
to
assume a degree of familiarity with basic map generation concepts that I
don't
have yet.

Any ideas on where I can go to learn about this topic?